Jan 23, 2014

Creating Jon Stewart Moments with TV News Archive and KettleCorn

At MozFest 2013, ODDI unveiled KettleCorn, a customized version of Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker, a tool designed to help busy journalists quickly create interactive videos. MozFest is an amazing conference that brings together open-source developers, journalists, educators and activists. One of the most intriguing things that I saw at this year’s conference was the ability to pull video clips from the TV News Archive and edit them in Popcorn Maker.

The TV News Archive is a service provided by the Internet Archive. The site enables users to, “Search more than 516,000 U.S. broadcasts using closed captioning; Borrow broadcasts on DVDs; View and Cite short streamed clips; Compare and Contrast perspectives across networks, stations and time; and Place video quotes within your commentary.” (Here’s an interesting article from the New York Times on the goals of the Internet Archive.)

Last fall at MozFest, Tracey Jaquith (@tracey_pooh) unveiled a very cool new feature of the TV News Archive. After searching and finding a video, users can quote the clip and import it into a Popcorn Maker project.

“When Mozilla integrated Popcorn Maker with archive.org, we immediately knew that was a feature we wanted to integrate with KettleCorn,” said Joe Flowers, lead KettleCorn developer for ODDI. Our KettleCorn team got to work soon after returning home from the conference to make this function available.

An obvious potential use of the integration is making one’s own ‘Jon Stewart moments’–on The Daily Show, video clips of a public figures contradicting themselves are strung together for humorous affect.

Watch the short video tutorial explaining how to integrate TV News Archive content into a KettleCorn project: